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Thursday, 29 May 2014

Looking To The Future

Had to give back word to
the Bilderberg Group bash in Copenhagen this week. It would have been a pleasant trip and
amusing in its way. Spending a few days
with Great Persons all of whom are representatives of a past era would have
been nostalgic but not very useful.

Historically, it would have
been reminiscent of the aristocrats, grandees and magnates who gathered
together at Versailles in the last years before The Revolution of 1789 swept
them away. They were convinced of their
permanence and greatness and right to rule.
They were wrong.

Then like now the first
signs are small ones, usually disregarded or not given much attention. What follows are events, disruptions,
unexpected movements and unintended consequences creating a mix of chaos and
calamity.

One apparently small sign
could be the return of the Dead End Job to be the major employment and economic
future of the large majority of the population.

Just about old enough to
remember this as a fact for most school leavers and to have known many people
whose lives had been in such jobs and whose parents lives more so, this sends a
shiver through the memory.

This item was triggered by
a phone call and incidental to it was mention of job changes at work. A feature of this was that his company had
removed a whole swathe of management. The
basic workers were less affected and most of the big bosses stayed. It was the ones in between that took the hit.

Allied to this has been a
good many reports of restructuring and fundamental reorganisations in many
types of activity and these are beginning to gather pace. The reasons are complicated but not entirely
financial, despite its critical role.

It has to do with what we
consume or need, how we get it and how the relevant businesses are organised,
controlled and in communication with each other. And at the bottom, mostly the dead end jobs
are the people who do the basic work.

The combination of
globalisation, a variety of technologies with major economies of scale coupled
with the huge increase in the power, capability, extent and artificial
intelligence functions of computers etc. are causing a rapid transformation.

So all the easy and blithe
assumptions and predictions made even less than a decade ago about work,
employment, structures, managing and deciding are now being overtaken by a new
world and not just of business but a lot else.

With it are going huge
numbers of middle and higher range management jobs and those to which not just
people have aspired, but major areas of higher education have been devoted to
supplying with labour.

This is going to have some
nasty consequences. One is that you
cannot have extensive free movement of labour and fluid markets for it with at
the same time rigorous employment legislation and regulation.

Because you will be trying
to protect past jobs and if you do not free up the new jobs will go somewhere
else and that can be anywhere in the world open to unprotected dead end jobs
and with the spare labour to do them.And very few in any of our
governments and especially in Europe and critically among people like the
Bilderberg group have a clue about what is happening, why, or when or where it
will hit.

2 comments:

Some time not in the far distant future there will not be many jobs at all dead end or not. Machines and AI will replace them. To a Luddite a disastrous prospect but it need not be so. In the end it will depend on the will to face the prospect with reason and intelligence and in doing so reap the considerable rewards on offer. However reason and intelligence is somewhat in short supply amongst humans and the transition will be arduous and fraught with problems. The first to be effected will be those who occupy dead end jobs but they will not be at all pleased to lose them unless sensible ways are found to compensate. If sensible ways are not found then General Ludd and Monsieur Guillotine may well reappear.